


Healing the Broken

by ssrhpurgatory



Series: Star Trek AU [6]
Category: Star Trek, Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Star Trek Fusion, Betazed, Betazoid, Broken telepaths, F/M, Post-Dominion War (Star Trek), Vulcan, WHO CAN SAY?, is this really out there AU w359 or Star Trek fic with OCs?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-16
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:27:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24208921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssrhpurgatory/pseuds/ssrhpurgatory
Summary: Taking the Star Trek AU that was an excuse to write horny telepath versions of Hilbert and Rosemary and using those versions to write an AU of that AU that’s much more “Vulcan doctor comes to help with post-Dominion War recovery on Betazed with a side of horny telepaths” than it is Wolf 359 fic.
Relationships: Alexander Hilbert/Original Female Character
Series: Star Trek AU [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1592506
Comments: 3
Kudos: 2





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Crash](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20262634) by [ssrhpurgatory](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssrhpurgatory/pseuds/ssrhpurgatory). 



Betazed was broken.

Betazed was broken, and so were her people.

The Dominion War had left them that way. The Dominion occupation of Betazed had been a cruel thing, a harsh thing, her people held in thrall by Vorta made especially to counter their mental powers, her people beaten down by the iron fist of Jem’Hadar soldiers.

And to drive the Dominion from their planet, the people of Betazed had done the unthinkable.

It was well known among the members of the United Federation of Planets that a Vulcan mind was a dangerous one, that a Vulcan unleashed could turn themselves into a weapon, could burn out every synapse in every brain within range of their telepathic reach, could kill untold numbers with the power of their mind alone.

No one had ever expected that a Betazoid, when pushed to the brink, was capable of the same, would even be capable of doing it.

But they were.

And they had.

And now no one knew whether it would be possible to heal the scars that were left behind.

“You’re certain you want to do this?” V’Ginn’s captain stared him down, a little frown between her eyebrows.

“You cannot go there. But I can. And there is some worry that if only Betazoids are involved in the rescue efforts...”

That frown between Isa’s eyebrows dug itself deeper, and then relaxed. “I read the reports. So many shattered minds...”

“And their empathy is only feeding it back upon them. They need...” V’Ginn searched for the right word. “Stability.”

“Vulcan stability, you’re saying.”

V’Ginn inclined his head slightly in acknowledgement. “Yes.”

Isa quirked one slanted brow upwards. “Maybe I _should_ go.”

“Even if you did not have this ship to look after, you are still half Betazoid, captain. And your empathic powers are not as well controlled as they should be.”

She sighed. “I know. Go, then. Look after my other planet for me.”

V’Ginn inclined his head in acknowledgement once more. “Dr. Stukov has made arrangements for med bay coverage. The EMH can step in if there are emergencies.”

“Starfleet will probably assign someone here temporarily if you’re gone more than a month.”

The thought of some other doctor taking his position of CMO aboard the Hephaestus irritated him, but like all emotions, his mind swept it away quickly enough. He would survive such an intrusion into his realm, provided he was allowed to eventually return... and his captain worked too well with him to accept any other outcome. This temporary assignment for crisis response was just that—temporary. “I will almost certainly be longer. You should put in an official request for a replacement now.”

Isa’s eyes widened for a moment; she knew the sort of control V’Ginn preferred to keep over his medbay. “If it’s your official opinion that we’ll need a replacement CMO while you’re gone...”

“It is.” And he would be back.

“Then I will. I think that covers everything. You’re dismissed. Go get packed.”

“Captain.” V’Ginn nodded his acknowledgement of the order and went to pack his entire life away. No doubt any replacement CMO would expect to have use of the CMO’s quarters.

An adult life spent in Starfleet had left V’Ginn with few personal possessions that could not be replicated, but even so, he was surprised by the number of boxes he needed to put in storage. There was little to pack to go with him other than clothing, and what clothing he intended to bring consisted of uniforms and lab coats, easy to wear and simple to clean. He would need his clothing to be both, he suspected. Even now, three months after the Dominion had returned to their own quadrant for good, the reports coming from Betazed were not promising. The infrastructure on the planet had not recovered, but worse than that, a madness threatened her people. It was a madness familiar to Vulcans, one they had left in their past, locked away by the teachings of Surak but an all-too-present threat all the same. To wield such power over the minds of others was a dangerous thing.

V’Ginn did not know whether one Vulcan could make a difference, in the face of such madness. But he had the opportunity, and he had to try.

The ensign who was tasked with transporting V’Ginn to Betazed—V’Ginn did not remember her name—was doing her final pre-flight checks on the Eupheme, one of the Hephaestus’s long-distance shuttles. Not that it was very far to Betazed, at their current location in space; a day and a half, twelve hours each way with time for unloading, could have the ensign back home aboard the Hephaestus.

It would be much longer before V’Ginn saw the ship that was his home again.

“Captain on deck,” came the dry tones of Isa from behind him.

The ensign jumped to her feet and to attention in an instant. V’Ginn simply turned his head and raised an eyebrow.

“I’d like a moment with Dr. V’Ginn,” Isa said, jerking her chin sideways. The ensign took the hint and murmured something about a cargo check before scampering past Isa and into the back portion of the shuttle, closing the door behind her.

“Captain?”

Isa sat in the chair the ensign had abandoned. “Relax.”

“I am relaxed.”

Isa started mindlessly carrying out the rest of the pre-flight checks the ensign had left half-finished. “I wanted to ask you a favor before you left.”

“A favor.” V’Ginn shot his captain a sharp look. “What kind of favor?”

“The personal kind.”

He knew immediately what it must be. “You had family on Betazed during the occupation.” More a statement than a question; every person with Betazoid ancestry he knew had had family on Betazed.

“Maybe. I don’t...” his captain’s jaw tensed, and he could feel her mind at work, dulling the fierceness of the jolt of pain that had shot through her mind. “One. I have—maybe had—one Betazoid relative living. An aunt.”

Only one? “You want me to look for her.”

“Yes.” The captain fumbled at the neckline of her uniform, fishing out a small pouch on a string, which she opened to pull out a holocube. “She was...” Isa’s voice tightened in her throat. “She could see what was coming. The last message I had from her, she was talking about taking a vacation somewhere off-planet.” The thread of humor that laced its way across the surface of Isa’s mind left V’Ginn certain that this aunt of his captain’s had made a joke of having to flee for her life in the face of an invasion force. “But I haven’t heard anything from her since then. And the way things are on Betazed—“

“Captain…”

“I know. I know she’s probably dead.” Isa activated the holocube, revealing an image of a round little Betazoid woman, almost as dark of skin and hair as her niece, a giant grin on her face as she hugged a young child with pointed ears and Betazoid-black eyes close. A young child who had unmistakably grown into the woman sitting next to V’Ginn. “But just in case she isn’t…” Isa deactivated the cube and held it out to V’Ginn. “Her name is Rwiari Ibreten.”

V’Ginn took the holocube and tucked it into a pocket on the lab coat he was wearing over his uniform. “I will remember. And I will look for her.”

Isa’s face softened for a moment. “Thank you. For this, and for going when I cannot.” She paused, a little frown taking up residence between her eyebrows, where one had often lingered since the Dominion War had begun. “Be careful. I want you back in one piece.”

“This ship will not fall apart if it loses me as CMO,” V’Ginn said, knowing that was the truth, for all that he resented the thought that someone else might soon take his position here.

“No, but I might fall apart if I lose my friend.”

He shot her a startled look at that, but she avoided his gaze as she swung herself to her feet, patted him on the shoulder, and left the shuttle without another word.

V’Ginn spent most of the trip to Betazed reading. The latest reports on conditions there, information about every known mental ailment that Betazoids could suffer from, courses of treatment. The hold of the Eupheme was packed full of synthesized hormones and neurotransmitters, sedatives and painkillers, all supplies that had been desperately needed when he had reached out to the Starfleet officers who were leading recovery efforts. The replicators on Betazed could not keep up with the demand.

All the reading in the universe could not have prepared V’Ginn for what Betazed was actually like. He could feel their pain from the moment the shuttle hit atmosphere, shifting and twisting like a malignant growth in the minds of an entire people.

He almost turned back at that. Would have, if the ensign flying the shuttle had been affected by it as much as he was. Fortunately, the ensign was Terran and not telepathically sensitive, and she seemed to be completely unaware of the psychic aura that covered the surface of the planet. But even she grew uneasy after they landed.

“You are all right?” V’Ginn asked, using the routine of being a doctor to push through his own reaction to the pain.

“I feel a little weird,” the ensign confessed with a shudder. “Like something is crawling under my skin.”

“You intended to spend the night here before returning to the Hephaestus?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You should return to orbit in the shuttle once the supplies have been unloaded and sleep there.”

The ensign gave him a sharp look. “Sir, are you saying it isn’t safe to stay on the surface of the planet? Should I take you with me when I go?”

V’Ginn carefully nudged his mental barriers into place around the ensign’s mind as well. Rhea, that was the woman’s name. “Not safe if you cannot maintain barriers against telepathic intrusion yourself. I will be safe enough.”

Rhea shuddered again. “Then let’s get this lot unloaded. I want to get out of here before something fries my brain.”

V’Ginn wanted to promise that he could keep her safe as long as she remained close to him, but Betazed had produced more than a few telepaths strong enough to challenge even the most skilled Vulcan. So perhaps he could keep her safe... or perhaps some rogue telepath would rip through V’Ginn’s mental barriers like tissue paper and turn that promise into a falsehood. Better to not make that promise in the first place.

A pair of exhausted looking Betazoids in Starfleet uniforms were standing to attention when the door to the shuttle opened. They both outranked Rhea, but sprang to action the instant she requested their help in unloading the shuttle. Usually, V’Ginn would not have bothered with such menial tasks, but he worked side by side with the Betazoids and Rhea until the hold was once more empty and Rhea was off again, back into orbit, a safe distance from the disturbed empathic field that filled the atmosphere of Betazed. Or at least, safer than she would be on the surface of the planet.

V’Ginn had let his mind drift as they had worked, feeling out the currents and eddies of the empathic field in the vicinity. Somewhere, very close by, there was a cluster of very strong telepaths and projective empaths. The local disturbances were centered there, he thought. Probably a hospital; several of those minds were groggy and disoriented, as if sedated. His suspicions were confirmed a few minutes later when he was loaded aboard the same ground transport as some of the medical supplies he had brought with him and driven in that direction.

“You’ll be quartered somewhere else,” the driver of the transport said, “but you should check in with the head physician first.”

“Very well.” V’Ginn saw no need to comment further than this, and, most unusually for a Betazoid, the driver seemed uninterested in offering up conversation where it was not prompted. Not surprising; she was exhausted, mind and body. Unfortunately, V’Ginn needed some answers about the local situation. He slid his mental walls carefully in around the driver’s, blocking as much of the empathic field as he could. “Better?”

The driver had tears in her eyes as she nodded. “Thank you. Oh.” She swiped ineffectively at her cheeks with the back of one hand. “It’s been a lot. Especially when I get this close.”

“Mm. Is it like this everywhere on planet’s surface?”

The woman shook her head. “The worst affected were all moved to this facility.”

“Why?”

“It’s closest to one of the few spaceports that’s still in decent enough condition to bring supplies in, but beyond that, there’s the burnout. This makes it easier for teams to cycle through, and keeps them away from more vulnerable populations.”

“Is it not unsafe, to have so many unstable telepaths in one location?”

“Worse to have them spread among the population,” the driver said, her jaw stiff. “They were causing mass hallucinations.”

V’Ginn opened his mouth to ask what they had been hallucinations of, and how the hospital was preventing such things here, but the weariness of the driver and the sudden rumble of a rough road beneath the tires of the transport stopped him from asking. Better to not distract her further. He could wait until he got to the hospital.

The hospital, when they arrived, was strange and silent. He was used to a medical bay full of quiet chatter, but here, in a hospital full of telepaths, there was no need for spoken words. After so many years on a Starfleet ship, it was difficult to adjust to.

The lead physician was a tall beanpole of a woman with dark circles around her eyes. “Dr. Sturaha Egolo,” she said in a hoarse whisper when he introduced himself. “Forgive me. I’m about tapped out telepathically at the moment.”

V’Ginn did her the same favor as he had done the transport driver, and slid his own walls in around her mind, shoring up shielding that felt like it was about to collapse. Like the transport driver, Dr. Egolo looked as if she were about to cry with relief. “If all you do here for people is that,” she said in that same hoarse whisper as she shored up her own mental defenses, “It will be well worth having you here.”

“Everyone here is tired from constantly defending themselves. Soon I will be tired too. I will be happy to help with this as much as I can, but I would much rather fix what is causing this problem.”

Dr. Egolo gave him a wan smile. “Right to business. I truly don’t know how much you’ll be able to help, though. So much of what we’re doing involves therapy meant to pull them back into healthy mental patterns...”

“Healthy Betazoid mental patterns, you mean,” V’Ginn said, letting just a little of the amusement he felt slip out before quashing it thoroughly. “And I am not Betazoid.”

Dr. Egolo nodded. “You understand.”

“And this is effective?”

“For most patients, yes. And then we move them off-site once they’re stable enough to live among the general population, which speeds their recovery.”

“They do not get negative feedback from the other patients?”

There was a sigh from Dr. Egolo. “They do. But it’s safer having them as a group than spread out individually. They feel safer surrounded by other damaged minds, lash out less, suffer fewer delusions. And sometimes we can get a positive feedback loop going that pulls a whole group of them out at once.”

“They have formed a hivemind, then?”

“Of sorts. More... a protective collective of individual minds.”

V’Ginn did not see much difference between the two, but chose not to comment. Clearly Dr. Egolo saw a distinction, and that was what mattered. “You said for most patients. And for the rest?”

Dr. Egolo suddenly looked very grim, every tired line of her face emphasized by her exhaustion. “Some are so far gone it’s just a waiting game, now. Their minds are unreachable. We keep them sedated when we can, to keep them from pulling the healthier patients after them, but eventually...” she sighed. “Eventually their bodies will give out. Have been giving out.”

“Then I think that is where I start, yes?” V’Ginn let a wry little smile twist across his face. “Let me see what I can do for the hopeless cases.”

Dr. Egolo studied him carefully. “They’re dangerous when they come out of sedation. To themselves and to others. They’ll probably see you as a threat.”

“I expect so. But it is what I am here to do.”

Dr. Egolo laughed at that, a sound as raspy as her voice was. “You’re a stubborn bastard, I’ll give you that,” she said with a cheeky grin. “All right. But I reserve the right to pull you out if you make things worse.”

V’Ginn nodded. “A necessary precaution. Where do I start?”

“With a nap,” Dr. Egolo said drily. “Or I suppose meditation. That works almost as well for you Vulcans, doesn’t it?” At V’Ginn’s nod she continued. “You probably want to be as fresh as possible before we send you in.”

“Sleep, then,” V’Ginn said with a little nod. “Where will I be quartered?”

“I’m headed back to the temporary quarters now. I’ll take you with me.”

They walked from the hospital complex to a nearby apartment block. Dr. Egolo seemed footsore and too tired for the walk, but she had not suggested waiting for a transport. From the way she tilted her head back to bask in the weak sunshine, V’Ginn suspected she had been indoors for much longer than she usually preferred, and that the walk provided her with a little bit of time to enjoy the fresh air.

Dr. Egolo checked room assignments on a screen in the lobby of the apartment building before showing him how to transfer the code that would open one to his com badge. “You’ll need to live out of your luggage and keep it in storage while you’re in the hospital, I’m afraid. Space is at a premium and you’ll have to take whatever room is available when you come off shift.” Next she guided him to storage, which was really a bag of tags pinned to the wall next to a small transporter. Dr. Egolo set him up with a tag before summoning a small duffle of her own from where ever it was things were actually being stored.

“Surely there is someone else who could be showing me this process,” V’Ginn protested. “You are exhausted.”

“Less than I would be without your reinforcement,” Dr. Egolo said. “It would have taken longer to hunt someone down to show you than this has taken, and I was headed this way anyway. But now I think I’ll leave you to find your own room.”

The words contained a polite question that left him certain she would help him figure out where he was sleeping if he asked her to.

He did not ask. “If I return to the hospital on my own, they will know what to do with me?”

Dr. Egolo nodded. “I put in the assignment as we were talking.”

“Then goodnight.”

The room his badge code opened was tiny, just large enough for a bunk and a desk that folded down from the wall. He left his luggage there and decided to explore further before settling in. Down at the end of the hallway was an empty common area with a replicator, tables, and chairs, and through a door at the back of the room he found waste facilities and sonic showers. V’Ginn wondered if the apartment building had been assembled especially for use during this crisis or if it had existed beforehand, and if the latter, what purpose these apartments had served. Surely they were not meant for long-term occupation.

Still, it was not as if he needed much space. He returned to his room and settled himself onto the thin mattress of the bunk, shutting his eyes, slowing his breathing until he reached a state that wasn’t quite sleep but which could have easily been mistaken as such by an outside observer.

He would normally keep well within the bounds of his own mind, but something about the psychic current that roiled across the planet’s surface drew him to observe it. He let himself drift along, following the flow, letting the pain of it move through and around him.

They had not been ready. Even he, with his decades of training, would not have been able to do what they had done and remain sane. He felt it in the pain, in the shattered minds that reached for his as he moved among them.

Would his training mean anything, in this place? When a Betazoid mind was so different from the Vulcan one? Could he help them—the collective them or the singular them, it did not matter—with what he was capable of, or would it not be enough?

He had to find out.


	2. Chapter 2

Eventually, V’Ginn slept.

It left him uneasy, sleeping in a place like this. He knew he could rely on the boundaries of his own mind to hold, but he was used to the crew of the Hephaestus, where the only mind more powerful than his own was the Captain’s. But here...

He could only hope that they would remain sedated, could only hope that the doctors and nurses in the nearby hospital were not so tired as to make a mistake that would prove fatal to anyone incapable of protecting themselves against telepathic attacks. Could only hope that waking up again was only a matter of when and not if. But he needed what rest he could get, for as long as he was capable of getting it.

So he slept. And he dreamt.

V’Ginn was not used to dreaming. The teachings of Surak made for an ordered mind, one where it was not usually necessary to spend part of one’s night re-organizing and absorbing the day’s impressions. But dream he did, though upon waking he was only left with scattered impressions of what those dreams had been.

He had been lost. Lost, and looking for something he could not find.

Well, that was a pointed reminder, he found himself thinking as he woke. What were the chances he would find his Captain’s aunt, if she had not yet been reported among casualty lists or on the rolls of the survivors? Most likely she had died quietly and had been buried even more so.

He set that thought aside and turned his mind to his morning stretches before getting out of the bunk, a slow, careful set of movements meant to align bones and relax muscles and help his mind reach an optimum level of alertness. It did not work as well as it usually did, and the faint sense of unease he had carried with him while he had slept lingered all the while, leaving him full of a humming tension that seemed to gather to a point between his shoulder blades as he sat up.

He had known going into this that it was not going to be a pleasant experience, but had hoped for a few days more before it began wearing on him this way.

Nothing to be done for it other than getting to work.

_~No.~_

When V’Ginn had returned to the hospital and asked where to get his work assignment, he had been directed to this desk and this man, a harassed looking Betazoid in a lab coat with extremely rumpled looking scrubs beneath. _~Dr. Egolo approved the assignment.~_

The man frowned. _~Dr. Egolo might have approved it, but there’s no way I’m letting you near the catatonic cases. There’s too much at risk.~_

_~These are the patients who have not responded to other treatment?~_

The man nodded.

_~Then what is the harm in me trying to reach them?~_

The man’s jaw clenched. _~You’re not Betazoid_.~

_~It is not logical to refuse my help for that reason alone. Not when no other therapy has been able to reach them.~_

A vein pulsed in the man’s forehead, signaling further irritation. _~And this is why I hate Vulcans. You decide what is logical all on your own and then refuse to accept evidence to the contrary.~_ He glanced down at the console on the desk. _~I want you providing mental shielding for the therapy rotation. And that’s where Dr. Egolo should have put you too.~_

V’Ginn shoved his spike of indignation down and let his mind defuse it. _~May I have your name so that I know who to complain about when Dr. Egolo returns to the building?~_

 _~Are you refusing the assignment?~_ The man’s shoulders stiffened with indignation of his own.

_~No.~_

The man’s eyes, black and strangely emotionless for the moment, fixed on V’Ginn’s. _~You can tell her it was Dr. Imran Oraivi.~_ Dr. Oraivi dismissed V’Ginn with a wave of a hand that seemed to summon a page at the same time. _~Aandas will show you where to go and get you settled in.~_

 _~Very well.~_ And V’Ginn _would_ file that complaint when he had a chance, but for now he might as well do what he could for those on the therapy rotation. He followed the page deeper into the labyrinth of the hospital, to a long hallway where he was handed off to a nurse behind a desk.

She frowned, looking harried. _~Vulcans are primarily touch telepaths, right?~_

In response, V’Ginn slid his mental walls in around hers, shoring up a spot that seemed to be slipping. The nurse’s eyes widened... and then, with a stinging mental slap, she drove him from her mind.

 _~Ask permission next time,~_ she sent firmly in a tone that reminded him of his mother. _~I’ll assign you to Jiaso for now. She just checked in, and she’s on the verge of burnout, even if she doesn’t care to admit it.~_

He was taken to a door halfway down the hall and handed off once more, this time to an elderly woman, bone-thin and terrifyingly tall, with a great pouf of silvery curls haloing her head. She tilted her head to one side as if examining a specimen on a slide when she was presented with V’Ginn.

“Well, boy,” she said in a stern voice. “Show me what you’ve got.”

V’Ginn wondered for a moment why she had chosen to use her voice rather than the telepathy the other staff had greeted him with, but decided it was not important. He cleared his throat and answered with the same. “I may enter your mind?”

Jiaso laughed. “Rommene really ripped you a new one, huh?” She bent forward over V’Ginn, more than close enough to touch. “Come along boy, I don’t bite.”

If Jiaso were on the verge of burnout, he could not tell from a surface scan of her mind. Her protective walls held firm and fast against his cautious probing. “I confess,” he said as he examined her further, “I do not know what you need me for.”

Jiaso laughed again. “You’ll see.”

And he did.

He had not realized that the therapy meant to right the minds of the damaged Betazoids involved the therapists opening their minds the way it did. Had not realized that it was not a matter of walls and barriers, but instead a frantic mental struggle to connect with them in some small way, to remind them that this was what they had once been and what they could be again. Jiaso deflected the instinctive mental attacks from the patient she was working with and settled new patterns in their place that contained a complexity that V’Ginn could not even begin to comprehend.

He would have been useless for such tasks. Fortunately, it was not something he needed to try. His job, as it turned out, was to make sure that none of this struggle escaped the room—and, just a few times, to shore up Jiaso’s staggering mind when she began to waver.

Three hours passed in an eternity of individual minutes and in an instant, and then a nurse arrived to give the patient a sedative and wheel her away. Jiaso sagged back in her chair, eyes shut, fine lines of strain digging themselves deep on her face. “So now you know.”

V’Ginn swallowed hard. “Yes. It was not what I expected.”

Jiaso let out a bitter laugh. “You’ll get used to it.” And then she hauled herself to her feet. “Come eat a meal with me, young man.”

“I do have a name. It is V’Ginn.”

Jiaso only laughed at him and called him a charming young fellow.

The mess hall she lead him to was filled with the low buzz of exhausted conversation, a stark contrast to the silent state of the rest of the hospital. Dr. Egolo found them there, looking less exhausted but still pale and drawn, the face of a woman who had spent too many hours indoors and at work as of late.

“Oraivi tells me you have a complaint to file,” she said, sitting down with a tray of plain provender and a beverage that smelled like death by caffeine overindulgence.

V’Ginn shook his head. “Dr. Oraivi was correct,” he admitted. “I needed to know what the usual therapy was like before I attempted anything more advanced.”

Dr. Egolo eyed him beadily and let out a low, dissatisfied harumph. “Don’t tell him that. He’s arrogant enough already.”

V’Ginn raised an eyebrow, but did not answer, eating the rest of his meal in silence as Dr. Egolo affectionately scolded Jiaso—who was some distant relation, apparently—for picking up another shift so soon. He felt like an intruder in the face of the open fondness shared by the two women, by the way that Dr. Egolo wheedled a promise out of her older relative to leave the building and _go home_ once she had eaten lunch. While he had gotten used to such open emotion while serving on the Hephaestus, which only had a few other crew members with empathic or telepathic powers, it was strange to now be surrounded by telepaths and yet to find their minds so foreign to his.

Perhaps that was why he had such a headache.

But it did not matter. He had worked through worse. He would work through this.

_Rwiari shifted in her unnatural sleep, disturbed by… something. Some alien presence on her world, some alien presence touching the minds she protected, some alien presence that needed to go_ AWAY _._

_She was tired. So tired. Tired beyond the endurance of her mind, tired of holding this bond between minds that had been so essential to driving the Vorta and their Jem’Hadar troops off the planet. But here this foreign presence was, a certain sign that they had not yet achieved their goal._

_She gathered her strength, what there was left of it. Gathered together the minds she protected and rebuilt the shelter that kept them all safe._

_Fewer, now. They were so few._

_But their planet was in danger, and they were all that was left._

_She reached for that foreign mind, prepared to strike. And then… she hesitated. It was not a Betazoid mind, that much was clear, but there was something familiar about it all the same._

_No. This must be some Vorta trick, that was all. She steeled herself to strike… and hesitated once more._

_If it was some Vorta trick, who was to say that this didn’t mean that they had found some way to counteract this desperate weapon Rwiari had built of her own people? She owed it to them to not strike mindlessly, to not put them in any more danger than they were already in._

_So instead, as subtly as possible, she reached out and went to work infiltrating this stranger’s mind._

V’Ginn’s headache grew worse as the day went on, his pulse pounding angrily in his temples. He wanted to blame it on the shielding work he had gone back to after lunch, but instead it felt as if something—or _someone_ —was watching him. Not physically, but mentally, a mind brushing against his from just beyond where he could make out any sense of who it might be.

He asked Dr. Egolo about it when he came off his second shift in the therapy rooms.

“That would be the collective,” she said. “Well, we think it is. It doesn’t seem to have any sort of directing consciousness, but it is certainly… interested in new arrivals.”

“I see.” He rubbed his temple.

“Let me get you something for that.”

V’Ginn held his hand up. “Save it for someone who needs it more than I do.”

Dr. Egolo nudged his hand aside gently and pressed the hypospray in her hand to his neck. “You’re the one who needs it right now. You’ll get used to the pressure in a day or two, but we don’t want you accidentally bursting any blood vessels before then.”

V’Ginn let out a sigh of relief and shut his eyes as the pounding slowed and stopped. “Thank you.”

“Go off shift, doctor,” she said kindly, clearly intending to mother him as much as Jiaso had. “There’s no point in exhausting yourself the first day.”

As much as he wanted to protest it, there was logic to her suggestion. “Very well. Tomorrow, then.”

That night, he dreamt once more.

_Rwiari considered this newcomer from every angle. Not Betazoid, no, but there was still that familiar nagging sensation in the back of her mind. Had she touched a mind like this before?_

_She couldn’t remember. She couldn’t remember what had come before this, not beyond the war. She had been this for so long—_ too _long—but what other option had she had? Help had not come._

_At least she knew one thing now. This new presence on her planet did not seem to be a Vorta. Oh, perhaps it could still be some trick or trap, but they were creatures of emotion as much as Betazoids were, and this mind stifled every emotional response before it could be born._

_“Hello?”_

_The voice startled her; she had thought herself better protected. But the newcomer_ had _called out to her. She was certain of it._

_“Hello?” came the same call again, more hesitant this time. “Is someone there?”_

_Perhaps it was desperation that made her respond. Perhaps it was curiosity. Or perhaps it was boredom. But respond she did. “Who_ are _you?” she asked the presence. “_ What _are you?”_

 _“What are_ you? _” the presence asked in return. “I can feel you in my mind. You’re watching me. Why?”_

_“Because…” Because, because, because. Because all that was left of her was the shield and sword, tools meant to protect her people, to cut her people’s enemies to shreds from the inside out. Because every part of her was screaming that this new presence was dangerous, even if she had no proof of it._

_“Because?”_

_She fled._

V’Ginn woke in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. _Had_ that been a dream? Or had it been something else? Dr. Egolo seemed to think that the collective was a mindless mob, but there had been something _individual_ about this nighttime visitor. He had not seen her, but the fact that he knew that his visitor had been a _her_ must mean that she _had_ been an individual, mustn’t it?

He did not know. But the mystery of it interested him. Perhaps it truly had been just a dream… but if it had not been, if the mind he had felt observing his _was_ a member of the collective, perhaps that meant that they were not truly beyond hope or rescue.

It took a considerable amount of willpower to not go straight to the hospital then and there. But he had not been introduced to anyone on the night shift, and they would likely think him a madman if he rushed over there and demanded that they take him to the comatose patients. This was something that could wait until the morning.

And so, he waited. And listened, stretching out his mind to feel the hum of life around him, hoping that his visitor would return.

She did not.


End file.
